Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [357]
There may have been more to those episodes than the artistic ecstasies Kalbeck assumed. After all, Brahms usually worked in houses with others in earshot, and no one else reported scenes like those. In Mürzzuschlag his eavesdropping landlady had heard mostly pacing and humming and silence. This summer in Ischl, rather than the lash of the muse, Brahms’s wailing may have come from all the illness and death weighing on him. Some of it may have gotten into the music as well—such as the three Intermezzos for Piano that he called “cradle-songs of my sorrows.”
Elise Brahms had died in June. Brahms wrote Clara that his sister “lay desperately ill the whole winter.… We who were watching could not help wishing for the end long ago.”38 He was more shaken by this death than by that of his brother Fritz; so was Clara, who had long ago befriended Johannes’s sickly, simple sister. For all the years since he left Hamburg, Brahms had depended on Elise for news and gossip of home, of Laura Garbe and Friedchen Wagner and the other girls of his Frauenchor who were now becoming old women. Through the years Elise had faithfully attended performances of his music in Hamburg, and sat listening in tearful wonder. Her late and happy marriage to watchmaker Grund had cheered Brahms. All her life Elise had most loved her mother, flowers, a tidy house, friends, and her brother. She had stayed faithful to them all.
Johannes supported Elise for decades and wrote faithfully as well, the many letters of small news that were returned to him after she was gone. He had written her last from Ischl, the day after she died: “I’d like so much to visit you again and am always thinking how to manage the rather long trip.”39 When he got his letters back he pored over them, amazed at how many there were. Then he destroyed them, but he could never quite bring himself to burn hers.
By 1883 he had already liquidated the trunkfuls of youthful songs, sonatas, trios, and quartets that had been stored in Hamburg. Now in a note to cousin Christian Detmering, who had notified him of Elise’s death, Brahms asked for all the letters, books, and pictures in the house. He also mentioned an inscribed silver inkstand, the one the Hamburg Frauenchor had given him in 1859. At the same time he told Christian that he did not have room for the oil paintings of his father and mother. His stepmother kept the one of Johann Jakob in Pinneberg, where she lived with her son Fritz. The painting of his mother—could they find someplace to put it? (The picture was lost. He did have in the house some pieces of his mother’s fine embroidery, which he showed off to visitors.) In autumn 1893, Christian Detmering, the last of Brahms’s immediate family, died in the great Hamburg cholera epidemic.
At the same time as Brahms shared his news good and bad with Clara, her rage over his publishing Robert’s symphony continued to boil (those letters have not survived). If Brahms’s style of torturing loved ones was hit-and-run, Clara’s was a slow, relentless assault that wore you down. On her seventy-third birthday in September 1892, Brahms wrote her a sad greeting: “Please allow a poor pariah to tell you today that he always thinks of you with the same respect, and out of the fullness of his heart wishes you, whom he holds dearer than anything on earth,